Splash Back by John Holman

 

A Little Rain...and a REALLY Big El Niño? August 15, 2026

This Splashback will be a bit longer than usual. I've uncovered some interesting material...so bear with me please. July finally brought some precipitation back to the Upper Bear Basin after an exceptionally dry late spring and early summer. The rain was welcome, but it was not enough to erase the moisture deficit that developed after the snowpack disappeared unusually early this year. The Upper Bear Basin received approximately 1.7 inches of precipitation during July, about 200% of normal for the month. That was a clear improvement over June, when the Basin received only about 0.6 inches, roughly 43% of normal. By August 1, water-year precipitation had improved to approximately 97% of the 1991–2020 median, compared with about 90% at the beginning of July.

Precipitation Upper Bear Basin The graph below shows the YTD precipitation of the Upper Bear Basin. Although we are at 97% of median we had a very dry June 2026.

So July appears to have stopped the deterioration rather than reversed it. The additional moisture moved the Basin somewhat closer to normal for the water year, but we still entered August with a cumulative precipitation deficit. The timing of the rain is also important. Our mountain snowpack melted away roughly a month earlier than normal this year. July rain helps soil moisture, vegetation and may temporarily reduce irrigation demand, but it cannot replace the slow release of water from a mountain snowpack that normally supports Bear River flows into late spring and early summer. As I reported last month, despite reasonably good total precipitation earlier in the water year, the very dry April-through-June period combined with the early snowmelt left streamflows throughout the Upper Bear Basin very low.

Bear Lake Continues to Fall Bear Lake continued its summer decline during July. The lake was approximately 5914.76 ft on July 1 and [5913.4 ft on August 1, a decline of about 16 inches during the month. The lake began falling in mid-May as snowmelt runoff ended and water was released for downstream irrigation. By July, inflow from the Bear River into Bear Lake was essentially zero. Last month's Splashback reported a lake elevation of 5914.38 ft on July 10. A July decline of roughly 16 inches is large but not out of the ordinary the past 4-5 years. The rate of decline should begin to slow as we move toward the end of the irrigation season, but where the lake bottoms out this fall will determine how much stored water we carry into the next water year.